The financial crisis that exploded in 2008 isn’t past but prologue. The stunning rise, fall, and rescue of Wall Street in the bubble-and-bailout era was the coming-out party for the network of looters who sit at the nexus of American political and economic power. The grifter class - made up of the largest players in the financial industry and the politicians who do their bidding - has been growing in power for a generation.

Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire

Bringing together Matt Taibbi's most incisive and hilarious work from his "Road Work" column in Rolling Stone, Smells Like Dead Elephants shines an unflinching spotlight on the corruption, dishonesty, and sheer laziness of our leaders.

The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap

Poverty goes up. Crime goes down. The prison population doubles. Fraud by the rich wipes out 40 percent of the world’s wealth. The rich get massively richer. No one goes to jail. In search of a solution, journalist Matt Taibbi discovered the Divide, the seam in American life where our two most troubling trends - growing wealth inequality and mass incarceration - come together, driven by a dramatic shift in American citizenship: Our basic rights are now determined by our wealth or poverty.

Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America

Charles H. Ferguson, who electrified the world with his Oscar-winning documentary Inside Job, now explains how a predator elite took over the country, step by step, and he exposes the networks of academic, financial, and political influence, in all recent administrations, that prepared the predators' path to conquest. Over the last several decades, the United States has undergone one of the most radical social and economic transformations in its history.

The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power

From the American Revolution through the Civil Rights movement, Americans have long mobilized against political, social, and economic privilege. Hierarchies based on inheritance, wealth, and political preferment were treated as obnoxious and a threat to democracy. Mass movements envisioned a new world supplanting dog-eat-dog capitalism. But over the last half-century that political will and cultural imagination have vanished. Why? The Age of Acquiescence seeks to solve that mystery.

Injustices: The Supreme Court's History of Comforting the Comfortable and Afflicting the Afflicted

Few American institutions have inflicted greater suffering on ordinary people than the Supreme Court of the United States. Since its inception the justices of the Supreme Court have shaped a nation where children toiled in coal mines, where Americans could be forced into camps because of their race, and where a woman could be sterilized against her will by state law.

The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America - and What We Can Do to Stop It

The United States is more vulnerable today than ever before - including during the Great Depression and the Civil War - because the pillars of democracy that once supported a booming middle class have been corrupted, and without them, America teeters on the verge of the next Great Crash. The United States is in the midst of an economic implosion that could make the Great Depression look like child's play.

Capitalism v. Democracy offers the key to understanding why corporations are now citizens, money is political speech, limits on corporate spending are a form of censorship, democracy is a free market, and political equality and democratic integrity are unconstitutional constraints on money in politics. Supreme Court opinions have dictated these conditions in the name of the Constitution, as though the Constitution itself required the privatization of democracy.

Wages of Rebellion

Revolutions come in waves and cycles. We are again riding the crest of a revolutionary epic, much like 1848 or 1917, from the Arab Spring to movements against austerity in Greece to the Occupy movement. In Wages of Rebellion, Chris Hedges - who has chronicled the malaise and sickness of a society in terminal moral decline in his books Empire of Illusion and Death of the Liberal Class - investigates what social and psychological factors cause revolution, rebellion, and resistance.

Twilight of the Elites: America after Meritocracy

Over the past decade, Americans watched in bafflement and rage as one institution after another - from Wall Street to Congress, the Catholic Church to corporate America, even Major League Baseball - imploded under the weight of corruption and incompetence. In the wake of the Fail Decade, Americans have historically low levels of trust in their institutions; the social contract between ordinary citizens and elites lies in tatters. How did we get here? Christopher Hayes offers a radically novel answer.

Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War

Ever since 9/11 America has fought an endless war on terror, seeking enemies everywhere and never promising peace. In Pay Any Price, James Risen reveals an extraordinary litany of the hidden costs of that war: from squandered and stolen dollars, to outrageous abuses of power, to wars on normalcy, decency, and truth. In the name of fighting terrorism, our government has done things every bit as shameful as its historic wartime abuses - and until this audiobook, it has worked very hard to cover them up.

John L. Moncrief says:"If you care about our liberties, read this book."

One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America

Conventional wisdom holds that America has been a Christian nation since the Founding Fathers. But in One Nation Under God, historian Kevin M. Kruse argues that the idea of "Christian America" is nothing more than a myth - and a relatively recent one at that.

Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible

In his provocative new book, evolutionary biologist Jerry A. Coyne lays out in clear, dispassionate detail why the toolkit of science, based on reason and empirical study, is reliable, while that of religion - including faith, dogma, and revelation - leads to incorrect, untestable, or conflicting conclusions.

Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party

Inspired by the work of Psychologist Erich Fromm, who asserted that the fear of freedom propels anxiety-ridden people into authoritarian settings, Blumenthal explains in a compelling narrative how a culture of personal crises has defined the radical right, transforming the Republican party for the next generation and setting the stage for the future of American politics.

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate

In This Changes Everything Naomi Klein argues that climate change isn’t just another issue to be neatly filed between taxes and health care. It’s an alarm that calls us to fix an economic system that is already failing us in many ways. Klein meticulously builds the case for how massively reducing our greenhouse emissions is our best chance to simultaneously reduce gaping inequalities, re-imagine our broken democracies, and rebuild our gutted local economies.

All the Presidents' Bankers: The Hidden Alliances That Drive American Power

Nomi Prins ushers us into the intimate world of exclusive clubs, vacation spots, and Ivy League universities that binds presidents and financiers. She unravels the multi-generational blood, intermarriage, and protégé relationships that have confined national influence to a privileged cluster of people. This unprecedented history of American power illuminates how financiers have retained their authoritative position through history, swaying presidents regardless of party affiliation.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century

What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories.

A Fighting Chance

As a child in small-town Oklahoma, Elizabeth Warren yearned to go to college and then become an elementary school teacher - an ambitious goal, given her family’s modest means. Early marriage and motherhood seemed to put even that dream out of reach, but 15 years later she was a distinguished law professor with a deep understanding of why people go bankrupt. Then came the phone call that changed her life: could she come to Washington, DC, to help advise Congress on rewriting the bankruptcy laws?

The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted

There was a time, not so very long ago, when perfectly rational people ran the Republican Party. So how did the party of Lincoln become the party of lunatics? That is what this book aims to answer. Fear not, the Dems come in for their share of tough talk - they are zombies, a party of the living dead. Mike Lofgren came to Washington in the early eighties - those halcyon, post-Nixonian glory days - for what he imagined would be a short stint on Capitol Hill.

In Dog Whistle Politics, Ian Haney Lopez offers a sweeping account of how politicians and plutocrats deploy veiled racial appeals to persuade white voters to support policies that favor the extremely rich yet threaten their own interests. Dog-whistle appeals generate middle-class enthusiasm for political candidates who promise to crack down on crime, curb undocumented immigration, and protect the heartland against Islamic infiltration, but ultimately vote to slash taxes for the rich.

Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin's Snuff Box to Citizens United

For two centuries, the Framers' ideas about political corruption flourished in the courts, even in the absence of clear rules governing voters, civil officers, and elected officials. In the 1970s, the U.S. Supreme Court began to narrow the definition of corruption, and the meaning has since changed dramatically. No case makes that clearer than Citizens United.

Pity the Billionaire: The Unexpected Resurgence of the American Right

From the best-selling author of What's the Matter with Kansas?, a wonderfully insightful and sardonic look at how the worst economy since the 1930s has brought about the revival of conservatism. Economic catastrophe usually brings social protest and demands for change - or at least it's supposed to. But when Thomas Frank set out in 2009 to look for expressions of American discontent, all he could find were loud demands that the economic system be made even harsher on the recession's victims....

America's Bitter Pill is Steven Brill's much-anticipated, sweeping narrative of how the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, was written, how it is being implemented, and, most important, how it is changing - and failing to change - the rampant abuses in the healthcare industry. Brill probed the depths of our nation's healthcare crisis in his trailblazing Time magazine Special Report, which won the 2014 National Magazine Award for Public Interest.

No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State

In May 2013, Glenn Greenwald set out for Hong Kong to meet an anonymous source who claimed to have astonishing evidence of pervasive government spying and insisted on communicating only through heavily encrypted channels. That source turned out to be the 29-year-old NSA contractor Edward Snowden, and his revelations about the agency’s widespread, systemic overreach proved to be some of the most explosive and consequential news in recent history, triggering a fierce debate over national security....

Publisher's Summary

The dramatic story behind the most audacious power grab in American history.

The financial crisis that exploded in 2008 isn’t past but prologue. The stunning rise, fall, and rescue of Wall Street in the bubble-and-bailout era was the coming-out party for the network of looters who sit at the nexus of American political and economic power. The grifter class - made up of the largest players in the financial industry and the politicians who do their bidding - has been growing in power for a generation, transferring wealth upward through increasingly complex financial mechanisms and political maneuvers.

Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi here unravels the whole fiendish story, digging beyond the headlines to get into the deeper roots and wider implications of the rise of the grifters. He traces the movement’s origins to the cult of Ayn Rand and her most influential - and possibly weirdest - acolyte, Alan Greenspan, and offers fresh reporting on the backroom deals that decided the winners and losers in the government bailouts. He uncovers the hidden commodities bubble that transferred billions of dollars to Wall Street while creating food shortages around the world, and he shows how finance dominates politics, from the story of investment bankers auctioning off America’s infrastructure to an inside account of the high-stakes battle for health-care reform - a battle the true reformers lost.

Finally, he tells the story of Goldman Sachs, the “vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity”.

Taibbi has combined deep sources, trailblazing reportage, and provocative analysis to create the most lucid, emotionally galvanizing, and scathingly funny account yet written of the ongoing political and financial crisis in America. This is essential listening for anyone who wants to understand the labyrinthine inner workings of politics and finance in this country, and the profound consequences for us all.

While some people will take issue with the first chapter; I think Taibbi hits on something I've suspected for some time now. The fact that our mainstream news and debates are more or less meaningless or nonsense. Many people like to focus on Fox News as being so biased, but really they are just the logical progression of what most of the news has become.

To this point, I found the chapters about the commodity bubble the most interesting and revealing of how much we are all suckers. I don't remember any debate from Obama or McCain about the issue of speculation in regard to the price of gas during their campaigns.

I've enjoyed Matt Taibbi's appearances on television and some of his Rolling Stone writing, but had not had the chance to read his books. I looked forward to the release of this one, and wasn't disappointed, ordering it the day it was released and listening to it in long installments thanks to the Washington traffic.

Taibbi skewers both political parties and the entire media establishment for the mindlessness of what passes for discussion of what's happened to our economy since September, 2008, and before.

We're treated to a hysterical Taibbi review of the maiden voyage of USS Sarah Palin at the GOP National Convention (her hair in a bumpup that looked like a Flight Attendant for Piedmont, in a dress that screamed Wal-Mart Halloween Costume for angry white middle-aged female), then introduced to the events that were even then unfolding, without our knowledge, as our economic system was forever changed.

He actually got me to understand what a credit default swap is! It's a simple, easy-to-understand guide through the impenetrable gobbledeegook of Wall Street, and an indictment of all the media who haven't told us much of anything -- and of the politicians in both T-Shirts who want to keep it that way.

Read it. I enjoyed it very much. Congratulations, Matt Taibbi, and thank you for helping us understand.

This book added to my understanding of what is happening to America, like Todo pulling back the curtain in the Wizard of Oz, but it also organized and expressed many of the thoughts that have been dancing around at the back of my head about our political system in a irreverent, witty, and coherent fashion. Thank you, Mr. Taibbi for saying f***k you, when I can not.

I love this audio book. The things you will learn about the world, the economy, politics and business are amazing. There are twists and turns, humor, and good explanations that will leave you shocked and surprised. Narration is very good. Could not put it down. Excellent.

This is classic Matt Taibbi. He is not afraid to use blunt, honest, language. Such as calling the individuals who nearly caused another Great Depression a variety of terms never heard from journalists or the pundit class except when attempting to smear members of the other political party.

Having read other books on the recent financial crisis (e.g., "The Big Short") I thought I had a good understanding of the underlying causes and perpetrators. But listening to Matt's account I found myself occasionally sounding like a sufferer of Tourette syndrome as I learned new details about how the amoral, greedy, stupid "masters of the universe" at AIG, GoldmanSachs, et. al. nearly destroyed the world.

Buy a copy for yourself and another for your Tea Bagger family member or friend.

I've read some Taibbi - and he's a frustrating read. For example, the reviews above this are *both* correct The best thing about Griftopia is also the worst: Matt is now so entrenched among the "common person," he has lost perspective of where we are as readers. Taibbi does a great job of decoding some bank "definitions" and moves. And at the same time, Matt is close to Lewis Black inasmuch as his opinions come through in ways where I ask: MATT, next book, just write from the gut, and make the issue your OWN. In other words, Taibbi has strong and ultimately interesting - but he is slippery where fact meets opinion. What a relief from the glut if taking the banking establishment too seriously. Is he right about Ayn Rand and objectivism? He made me think - which is what one gets in only the best of books. MOST EXCELLENT: he reads it.

matt taibbi comes from a journalistic familyhe was well educated but not surrounded by moneythe 2008 recession gave him a crash course in finance

the schools i attended were a AAA club for wall streetintelligence, diligence and amoral greed were well rewardedmy recent 35th college reunion only reinforced this notion

the story shows that congress is truly " a parliament of whores "wall street, as expected, is a den of soulless vipers in brioni suitstaibbi's lack of a $ back ground gives him a fresh eye on this scene

but when you have a story this " hot " it helps to use cool rhetoricphrase like - a__ hole / dou___ bag / sh__ head - don't help your causehis youth and fired up enthusiasm betrayed him on this point

taibbi predicts that we'll soon have another financial crisisthe faulty systems and institutions just haven't been fixed or regulatedthe prophet jeremiah and e. carter glass wouldn't be surprised

This book is brilliant. Matt Taibbi's rants directred toward Alan Greenspan was one of my favorite sections of the book. The further you go in this book, the more it reminds me of a well staged horror film. You're terrified by the greedy hacks that control our economic and social life, but you can't turn away, you're forced to listen to the unraveling of a once great nation. But don't get me wrong, this is a very funny book and anyone who's interested in the 2008 meltdown should read this. (or listen).

2 of 2 people found this review helpful

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